GOLDENBOY: THE STORY

SYNOPSIS

When a ship runs aground in the English Channel, one small-time drug dealer, CAL, gets his hands on a priceless artefact from amongst the wreckage: an ancient Celtic Axe, rumoured to have mystical powers.

Using the annual folk-festival as cover, Cal tries to sell this mysterious object with the help of his odd-ball female apprentice, CLEFF. Cal is certain he will achieve the status he’s always craved. But he will face greater forces than the law over the next twenty-four hours. For this tourist town was sacred once, built on old ley lines pulsating with ancient energy from a noble past... 

Loosely inspired by JACK AND THE BEANSTALK, Goldenboy is a modern folk-tale that explores our relationship with the myths of the past. How they can trap us, comfort us and inspire us. 

Like the beans are to Jack, Cal’s artefact seems to be a fanciful ticket to a different life. And, in a way, it will be. Because it leads him to confront the demons of his past. The reasons he's trapped in arrested development, divorced, estranged from his kid, still dealing weed to teenagers and hitting on younger women.

Tonight he'll come face to face with the truth, that he's been clinging onto a myth. 

It's time to re-write his story.

WRITERS’ STATEMENT

We met the real-life Cal at a folk festival in Devon. His bravado belied a sense of pathos which we related to, a poignant feeling that his time in the sun had been and gone and he was doomed to chase his past. We started to visualize a single day in which this once-impressive goldenboy confronted his reality and lost his grip on the dream he’d concocted. We were instantly buzzing with how we could capture this on screen. 

Tonally, it felt like the makings of an epic Greek tragedy in one man’s mind, that wonderful fusion of the grandiose and the trivial that we love in Ruben Ostlend’s FORCE MAJEURE and THE SQUARE or the painfully funny pathos of Sean Baker's RED ROCKET. It was the perfect psychological tailspin to serves as the motor of our film.

But of course there was drama to the folk festival itself. A community's belief in its mythical past seemed risible set against the backdrop of the mundanity of a low-grade tourist town. And yet, there was something glorious about that belief too.

Because, ultimately, this is a movie that celebrates belief. Cal never gives up on his own ‘myth’, his dream that, even at the brink of death, it’s not too late to change his fate. In spite of his character’s deep flaws, he celebrates his past, he chases his destiny and believes in the impossible. Our final scene should feel as though Cal might be facing his demise or… maybe, with his belief, his utter defiance, maybe he will find his redemption. 

A ‘FOLK-THRILLER’

Goldenboy is a fusion of folk-mysticism meets ticking-clock crime-thriller. 

England’s true history is not one of Morris Dancers and picturesque village church spires. It is of blue-painted savages in the woods, paganism, a deep connection with the forces of nature. Cal will represent this hidden story. It is as though the modern banality of life cannot contain Cal’s spirit and his quest for glory, which finds succor from the ancient energy of the town’s noble past. 

The mundane and the epic, the grandiose and the grotesque should compete throughout, wrong-footing and disorientating the viewer so the audience is sucked into a world where, like Cal, they cannot safely determine myth from reality.